Andy Neary shows how to find and connect with prospects on LinkedIn. Search weekly by job title, company size, and location. Always add a note to your connection request, send high volumes of invites, and use voice messages to thank new connections and stand out.
In this video, I'm going to walk through part two of a four part series on your LinkedIn strategy for 2023. In fact, it's a four part series, a four part process we call the four Ps of LinkedIn prospecting.
And today we're going to focus on the second P, proactive connections. Now, if you missed the first video, want you to go back to the YouTube channel, check it out. It's the first P of the four P's LinkedIn prospecting. How to enhance your LinkedIn profile so it stands out above the competition. But today we're gonna talk about proactive connections. Now, please do me a favor. When you get a second, go to the lower right corner and please hit the subscribe button. It always helps. So let's talk about the second P of your LinkedIn strategy of 2023, proactive connections. Now this is a sticky because if you're like me, you are getting a lot of LinkedIn connections these days. And those connections are not from your ideal prospect. Right. Those connections are coming from the SaaS, sales, the LinkedIn optimizer, the people who can help you grow your business to the next level. Yeah, all that spam you're getting in your inbox every day, all those unintended invites or those uninvited invites that you have. You see, it's become harder and harder to make good LinkedIn connections these days because of all the spam we get. But when it comes to proactive connections, you only have one job. Connect with people you could do business with. So here's. I want to share a quick analogy that I think is going to help create a lot of clarity for you, especially when it comes to step two and step three of the four Ps of LinkedIn prospecting. Here is how you want to view your your time on LinkedIn. I want you to take a look at all of your connections. You might have 3, 4, 500 connections, you might have 5,000, you might have 10,000. No matter how many connections you have, I want you to view this as your community and you're the mayor of that community.
And as mayor of your community, you have two jobs. Number one, you want to invite new residents to come live in your community. But they got to be the right residents. Who are the right residents, People you can do business with. And number two, you've got to make those residents feel good to live there. How do you do that? You create great content for them, which we'll talk about in step three. But today, let's Talk about how you can go start making those proactive connections. It's pretty simple. If you want to connect with people you could eventually do business with, there's a couple of ways you can go about doing that. Number one, go right to the search button. Go click on the filters, go click on your market. Could be Denver, Colorado, could be Baltimore, Maryland, might be Dallas, Texas, I don't know. And search through via the filters for the CFOs, the HR professionals, the CEOs, the presidents you want to connect with. Now, I'm going to bring this with a warning. At this point in the game, when you're trying to create proactive connections, you don't know if these are potentially good prospects. What you do know is you know that they could be a fit for your business demographically, right? They have the right job title, they're at a company who's the right size, they're in the right market, but other than that, you know nothing else about them. So you don't know if they're going to be a good fit yet or not. However, you still want to bring them into your community because the content, which we'll talk about in step three, is what's going to get the right prospects to raise their hand. So the second step in the four Ps of LinkedIn prospecting is make connections with people you can do business, so make it part of your strategy to spend time on a weekly basis to go and search for people who could be good prospects. And you're probably only going to be able to search by job title, by company size, by market, by location, and just start sending out connection requests. Now, a great way to send out a connection request is not to just hit the generic link or connect button LinkedIn gives you. Add the note. If you go to make a connection with a prospect, you'll notice LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to add a note. You, you always want to add a note. And in that note you're going to say something really simple like this, Andy, I'd love to connect with you here on LinkedIn, if you're open to it. It's a really good passive way to send a connection request out. And the key words being here on LinkedIn, you don't want the prospect believing that you're trying to schedule a meeting with them because then they're probably not going to accept your connection. But if you make it very clear, hey, I'm just trying to connect with you here on LinkedIn, the odds that they accept your connection are going to go Up. Now, here's where your connections can go to the next level. At this point, it's a numbers game. If you make it a goal to send out 50, 75 connections a week. By the way, LinkedIn doesn't allow you to send any more than 100. Some are going to accept, some are not. It's a pure numbers game. Now, when people accept, here is where you take the connection to the next level to Ninja Move. If you go look at the mobile version of LinkedIn. I hope you are using the mobile version of LinkedIn. When you have a first connection, you can actually send them a voice message. It's unbelievable. It's a feature that's been out for over two years, yet few people know it's there. When people accept my connection, the first thing I do is I go and I send them a voice message that sounds like this. Hey, Greg, it's Andy. Just wanted to thank you for the LinkedIn connection. If you need anything from me, feel free to reach out. Just wanted to say thank you. Hope you enjoy the content I'm putting out here on a daily basis. Have a great day. That's it. I'm not asking for anything. I'm not trying to drive them to a meeting right away. I'm just thanking them for a connection. But the voice message feature is a pattern disrupt. They're not used to getting it. They're like, wow, I won't. You won't believe how many times I have my own prospects that I send messages to say, whoa, that's awesome. I did not know you could do this. And that's the point. You want to stand out instantly with your prospects. Send them a voice message, thank you when they accept your request. So that's step two of the four Ps of LinkedIn prospecting, proactive connections. Yes. You need to block time to build your community. Invite the right residents in, and when they accept, send them a nice little voice message. It'll make their day, it'll make you stand out, and it's a great way to start a good relationship.
